Last minute exam tips by CIE Examiners!!

General tips for English Language Paper (1123 and 0500) exam papers

• Do not write rough drafts. You cannot afford the time to write out every answer twice, and it is neither required nor desirable that you should do so; plans are sufficient.

• Take two different coloured highlighters into the exam. You need to annotate all the passages, and it is especially useful to use two colours for the summary and other questions where there are two types of material asked for. But don’t go mad with the highlighting! Only single words or short phrases should be highlighted in a text, otherwise you are not precisely identifying your useful phrases and will end up with a ridiculous amount of highlighted text.

• Regulate your time and keep an eye on it. Beware which question requires ore planning.

• If you run out of time on the last question write notes instead of full sentences. You will lose fewer marks for doing this than for continuing to write in sentences but leaving the answer incomplete. Indicate what points you would have made and you will get some credit for them.

• Suggestions for length are given as a number of pages and are there to help you understand what is expected and what is possible within the time limit. Answers which are shorter or longer will be self-penalising.

• However, the exam is assessing quality rather than quantity. Do not waste time counting words either during or after you have finished your responses. The time would be better spent improving content, expression and accuracy.

• Avoid using ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’ and ‘then’. These are immature ways of linking ideas and events.

• If you finish the exam early, go back and check your answers again; you may have  missed something.

• Do the questions in the order in which they are printed on each exam paper, as there is a reason why they are in that order. In particular you should not read both passages on Paper 2 before answering question 1.

• Have a pen (and a spare) for the exam with which you can write legibly and neatly. It is good policy to get the examiner on your side with a well-presented script. Often untidy writing is associated with poor spelling and punctuation.

• Underline the key words in every question, and then use them to plan around.

• Make your endings strong; they are what the examiner has in their mind when they are  deciding on a mark. There is no point in repeating anything you have said earlier.

• If you are weak on sentence structure do not attempt over-long and complicated ones in which you lose grammatical control. On the other hand, you should use complex sentences rather than simple or compound structures throughout the exam, as these are
what formal English requires and educated writers produce, and they will give concision, precision, variety and maturity to your style.

• Use commas to separate clauses in a sentence. It is sometimes difficult to follow meaning where they have not been used and should have been. Commas are not, however, a  substitute for full-stops, and ‘comma-splicing’ is penalised heavily in this exam, as it shows an inability to understand what a sentence is and how the building blocks of language work. 

• Detail, detail, detail. Every one of your exam answers will benefit from use of supporting
detail, either textual, factual or creative.

Source: www.cambridgestudents.org.uk